PROSOCIAL BEHAVIOR
CHAPTER 9 HELPING: PROSOCIAL BEHAVIOR
In Hattiesburg, Mississippi, an elderly washerwoman donated her lifelong savings of $150,000 for scholarships at the local college. Oseola McCarty had lived alone for decades. Who else but strangers would get her gift? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oseola_McCarty)
Why did Ms. McCarty give her unselfish gift? Social psychologists study such prosocial behavior, examining its underlying causes—both dispositional and situational. Social psychologists also debate its core motives—egoistic, altruistic, collectivist, or principled. This chapter argues that these motives fit combinations of our core social motives. Debates have raged over the evolutionary significance of self-sacrificial behavior, as we will see, and the core motives shed some light on this contentious issue. We will examine how prosocial behavior can result from specific factors as varied as social learning, mood, attributed responsibility, empathy, identity, norms, and moral reasoning. But first, let’s define our terms and organize these topics according to clusters of motivations.
WHAT IS PROSOCIAL BEHAVIOR?
No one would disagree that Oseola McCarty’s gift represents prosocial behavior. But what about a fictional family whose son dies, and they take in his young widow? Blamed for his death and hideously disfigured by a botched suicide attempt, she is barely tolerated, but she is called Precious Auntie and lives with the family nonetheless. In keeping with ancient beliefs in traditional China, the son’s ghost came to the grandmother
in a dream and warned that if Precious Auntie died, he and his ghost bride would roam the house and seek revenge on those who had not pitied her. Everyone knew there was nothing worse than a vengeful ghost. They caused rooms to stink like corpses. They turned bean curd rancid in a moment’s breath. They let wild creatures climb over walls and gates. With a ghost in the house, you could never get a good night’s sleep. (Tan, 2001, p. 175)1
Given their beliefs, was caring for her a prosocial act, and if so, was it egoistic self-interest, empathic altruism, collective family loyalty, or principled morality? As we will see when we define these terms and the research they each encompass, cultures differ in their interpretations of responsibility, with some Eastern ones emphasizing responsibility (for certain ingroup members) and some Western ones emphasizing more personal factors such as liking and direct self-interest.
Conceptual Definitions
Prosocial behavior includes behavior intended to benefit others—behaviors such as helping, comforting, sharing, cooperating, reassuring, defending, and showing concern (Schroeder, Penner, Dovidio, & Piliavin, 1995, p. 15). Note several features of this definition: First, it includes the intent to help others, so acts that unintentionally help others do not count (for example, taking a new job may benefit another person who fills the old one, but that was probably not the intended consequence). However, acts intended to help, which may actually fail to help, would be included (for example, it would be useless, but still prosocial, to shovel snow off the front walk of someone who uses only the back door). Second, what actually benefits another person is socially defined, changing with time and place. Depending on the context, prosocial acts might include circumcision, foot-binding, piercing, scarring, tooth-pulling, or ruthless criticism. Finally, note that benefit to one or more others, including society, but not benefit to self, is key. The positive behavior is social and interpersonal, not self-directed in its intent.
Social psychologists often distinguish a subset of prosocial behaviors according to their motivations. Although prosocial behaviors are intended to benefit others, the underlying motivation might or might not be other-oriented. Altruism conceptually underlies the subset of prosocial behavior that is “motivated mainly out of a consideration of another’s needs rather than one’s own” (Piliavin & Charng, 1990, p. 30). As a motive, altruism involves self-sacrificial costs, absent “obvious, external rewards” (Batson, 1998, p. 282). Altruism thus involves concern for others’ needs, independent of hoped reward or feared punishment outside the self (Grusec, 1991). By these definitions, then, the traditional family that took in their widowed daughter-in-law, for fear of her ghost, acted prosocially but not altruistically.
Operational Definitions
Prosocial behavior is good. Social psychologists, like everyone else, want to promote it, but to do so, they must first explain it. They have pursued two approaches, dispositional and situational. One possible explanation is that people behave prosocially because they have prosocial personalities. In this view, the Oseola McCarties of the world differ from the rest of us, and the trick is to socialize children to become more prosocial. Researchers pursuing this track use personality questionnaires, combining variables to predict helping, for example, a fellow student with severe stomach cramps (Gerbasi & Prentice, 2013; Staub, 1974; see Table 9.1).
TABLE 9.1 Personality Predictors of Helping Another Student
Positive predictors
Valuing helpfulness
Valuing equality
Taking responsibility for others, e.g.:
If a good friend of mine wanted to injure an enemy of his or hers, it would be my duty
to try to stop the friend.
Professional obligations can never justify neglecting the welfare of others.
I would be obligated to do a favor for a person who needed it, even though the friend
had not shown gratitude for past favors.
Endorsing social responsibility, e.g.:
I am the kind of person that people can count on.
I usually volunteer for special projects at school.
Cheating on examinations is not so bad as long as nobody ever knows.*
Moral reasoning (see Figure 9.5)
Negative predictors
Valuing a comfortable life
Valuing ambition
Valuing cleanliness
Machiavelli scale
The best way to handle people is to tell them what they want to hear.
It is hard to get ahead without cutting corners here and there.
Most people are basically good and kind.*
*Indicates a negatively worded item that researchers reverse-coded from others in the same set. Each questionnaire included other negatively worded items, to control for acquiescence response bias, but they are omitted here for clarity. Items listed are examples, not entire scale.
Another personality method, besides questionnaires, uses people’s initial reactions to choosing cooperative or competitive options in experimental games. You might try this method before reading further (Table 9.2). This test allows researchers to see what kind of social value orientation people spontaneously choose (Messick & McClintock, 1968), that is, what degree of rewards they generally prefer for themselves relative to a generalized other person. Three kinds emerge: individualistic (simple self-interest, also called max own), cooperative (helping self and the other simultaneously, called max both), or competitive(creating the biggest discrepancy of self over other, called max diff). When people choose consistently, they are classified as having one of these three orientations (Van Lange, De Bruin, Otten, & Joireman, 1997). Other individual differences involve empathy and perspective-taking (Eisenberg, 1991), described later.
TABLE 9.2 An Instrument to Measure Social Value Orientation
In this task we ask you to imagine that you have been randomly paired with another person, whom we will refer to simply as the “Other.” This other person is someone you do not know and you will not knowingly meet in the future. Both you and the “Other” person will be making choices by circling the letter A, B, or C. Your own choices will produce points for both yourself and the “Other” person. Likewise, the Other’s choice will produce points for him/her and for you. Every point has value: the more points you receive, the better for you, and the more points the “Other” receives, the better for him/her.
For each of the choice situations, circle A, B, or C, depending on which column you prefer most.
A
B
C
A
B
C
(1)
You get
480
540
480
(5)
You get
560
500
490
Other gets
80
280
480
Other gets
300
500
90
(2)
You get
560
500
500
(6)
You get
500
500
570
Other gets
300
500
100
Other gets
500
100
300
(3)
You get
520
520
580
(7)
You get
510
560
510
Other gets
520
120
320
Other gets
510
300
110
(4)
You get
500
560
490
(8)
You get
550
500
500
Other gets
100
300
490
Other gets
300
100
500
Participants are classified when they make six or more consistent choices. Prosocial choices are 1c, 2b, 3a, 4c, 5b, 6a, 7a, 8c; individualistic choices are 1b, 2a, 3c, 4b, 5a, 6c, 7b, 8a; and competitive choices are 1a, 2c, 3b, 4a, 5c, 6b, 7c, 8b.
Source: Excerpted from Van Lange et al., 1997. Copyright © American Psychological Association. Adapted with permission.
In measuring the ways that personality predicts helping, researchers must consider measuring both personality and situation because they interact. In other words, different personalities are suited to different kinds of helping situations (Dovidio, Piliavin, Gaertner, Schroeder, & Clark, 1991). For example, in emergencies, the likely helpers are more impulsive, emotional, socially responsible, esteem oriented, and less oriented to safety and reality. These people and situations implicate helping based on sheer arousal. In long-term helping, the likely helpers are thoughtful about pros and cons, competent, confident, and responsible. These people and situations implicate helping based on a cost-benefit analysis. This distinction between people and situations suggests different research strategies about what variables to measure and manipulate, depending on the focus (e.g., emergency versus long term). About a third of Americans report long-term volunteering, and about a fifth report heroic acts (Zimbardo, Breckenridge, & Moghaddam, in press).
Most often, rather than measuring personalities or personalities in specific situations, social psychologists focus on situational causes. Experimental games as one operationalization of prosocial behavior can assess situational variables (as well as personality differences in social value orientation). Instead of merely choosing preferred outcomes, as in the social value orientation test of personality, participants actually play experimental games with strangers. This method developed as part of game theory (Colman, 1982; Luce & Raiffa, 1957). Normally the researcher sets up cooperative and competitive choices, as displayed in Figure 9.1. (Notice that the payoff matrix in Chapter 8’s discussion of interdependence theory derives from this kind of work.) The cooperative choice helps the partner, and the competitive one hurts the partner. Thus, a cooperative choice benefits both parties only if both parties cooperate (both people gain 2). But if one party cooperates while the other competes, then the competitor gains disproportionately (3) to the partner (0). If both compete, both lose, relative to most other outcomes (both get 1). Researchers manipulate situational variables, such as degree of communication allowed or patterns of partner choices, to track the frequency of cooperative (prosocial) and competitive choices.
Figure 9.1 Payoff Matrix for an Experimental Game of Cooperation (Prosocial) and Competition (Self-interest) Choices
In examining situational theories of prosocial behavior, social psychologists have elaborately staged some of our field’s most inventive operational definitions of helping. Many studies use emergency situations, based on the original classic, Darley and Latané’s 1968 study of bystander intervention in emergencies. That study, modeled after a gruesome and very public murder on the streets of New York, examined why bystanders might fail to intervene—precisely because the presence of other bystanders diffuses each individual’s sense of personal responsibility. (For present purposes, we describe just the method; we examine the theory later.) In the classic study, participants listened through earphones as a series of alleged other participants took turns discussing personal problems associated with college life. On his first speaking turn, one person mentioned hesitantly that he was prone to seizures. On his second turn, the victim began to have an audible epileptic seizure, over three full minutes. Experimenters timed how long it took participants to leave their experimental cubicle to help, if they helped at all.
As Table 9.3 indicates, participants’ helping was a direct function of the number of other people available to help (more bystanders, less helping). We will return to this study, but the relevant point for now is that this study introduced the now-standard emergency-helping paradigm. Since that study, participants have overheard explosions and toppling bookcases, and they have encountered people needing a ride to the pharmacy, a call for the towing service, an ambulance, or help picking up spilled groceries. Some of the staged emergencies represent social psychology at its most theatrical. But the impact of the operationalized emergencies is important, for researchers need to know how people respond when they are startled, aroused, and genuinely worried.
TABLE 9.3 Effects of Group Size on Helping
Group Size
% Responding by End of Seizure
Time (sec.)
2 (Participant and victim)
85
52
3 (Participant, victim, and 1 other)
62
93
6 (Participant, victim, and 4 others)
31
166
Source: From Darley & Latané, 1968. Copyright © American Psychological Association. Adapted with permission.
Not all helping occurs under emergency, in the real world or in the laboratory. Some prosocial behavior is dogged and reliable over time. For example, research participants may respond to videotaped or written scenarios depicting victims of ongoing distress (e.g., family, relationship, or school troubles). Participants may report their willingness to donate hours, blood, or money for charity. In field studies, participants may report their actual time spent volunteering with AIDS patients or other community efforts.
Core Social Motives
Why do people help in emergencies or donate resources over time? Prosocial behavior explicitly reflects four types of social motivation (Batson, 1994), which arguably reflect our core social motives. (1) Egoism (self-enhancement and controlling outcomes) contrasts with (2) altruism (which both indicates and maintains trust in the social world). (3) Collectivism represents group belonging, and (4) principlism reflects socially shared understanding of the moral world by those belonging to particular groups, as well as a sense of control over how people should behave. A partly overlapping set of motives surfaces in the self-reports of people who volunteer to work with people with AIDS (Snyder & Omoto, 1992). Social psychologists debate all these motives as if they were competing, even mutually exclusive explanations for prosocial behavior, but arguably each sometimes contributes to actual prosocial behavior—often in combination—so it is helpful to unpack them. Self-interest and other-interest are independent orientations (Gerbasi & Prentice, 2013).
SELF-ENHANCING AND CONTROLLING
Egoism focuses on self-interest as a motive for prosocial behavior. Self-benefit is the ultimate goal. For social psychologists who endorse this view, people help only because it fosters their own survival or that of their genetic kin or is an accidental spillover from mechanisms evolved to help genetic kin. Similarly, people might help only in order to obtain personal rewards or avoid personal punishments, including self or public esteem. Or people might help merely in order to alleviate their own distress at watching someone else suffer. Or people might help because they mistake their self-interest (Burton-Chellew & West, 2013; but see Camerer, 2013). In any case, egoism combines motives for controlling outcomes (contingency between what you do and what you get) and self-enhancing (protecting self-esteem). The controlling motive reflects the self-interest benefits just mentioned. As an example of self-enhancement, people who volunteer to help people with AIDS sometimes cite what the researchers label esteem enhancement (“to feel better about myself”) as a motivation (Snyder & Omoto, 1992).
TRUSTING
In direct contrast to egoism, altruism describes a motive that makes people help because of genuine concern for others, to increase the welfare of others. They expect people to be responsible for each other. Recall that we defined the trusting motive to reflect a need to believe that the social world is a benevolent place. With altruism, people interpret the situation to be one that deserves help, and they experience empathy for the victim. Feeling the other person’s pain motivates prosocial acts. The experience of individual sympathy and empathy distinguishes this motive from all the others. Apparently none of the AIDS volunteers explicitly cited simple altruism as their self-reported motive, perhaps because it would sound immodest. Regardless, altruism reflects the core social motive to trust, because it reflects the need to see people as fundamentally benevolent.
BELONGING
Collectivism identifies the group’s welfare as a central motive. Here, maintaining the group and one’s belonging to it motivates prosocial behavior. Helping ingroup others, following the group’s rules about reciprocity, playing one’s role, and adhering to norms all facilitate collective life. One helps one’s ingroup in order to maintain one’s ingroup identity. AIDS volunteers who cite community concern (“because of my concern and worry about the gay community”) illustrate collectivism. Note that the concern is for the group, not a specific individual, so this motive relates to the need to maintain belonging to a group. One’s own inconvenience and comfort are sacrificed for a group one cherishes.
UNDERSTANDING (AND CONTROLLING)
Principlism is motivated to uphold moral standards. Impartial and universal, moral standards result from people’s understanding of what is right and what is wrong. Principlism also relates to controlling outcomes, what people do and what they (deserve to) get. Thus, it implicates both understanding and controlling motives. People can reason at different moral levels, but principles or abstract standards guide prosocial behavior beyond self and group interest. Debatably, principlism reflects the core social motive of maintaining a coherent understanding of how the world ought to operate, perhaps mixed with a need for control, believing that certain ideas should guide one’s own and others’ behavior. As one example, AIDS volunteers who cite values (“because of my humanitarian obligation to help others”) illustrate principlism.
Not all the motives listed by the AIDS volunteers are covered here, because they do not typically appear in other research on prosocial behavior. For example, a direct application of our understanding motive might seem to be illustrated by AIDS volunteers who cite what the researchers label understanding (“to learn about how people cope with AIDS”), but a pure curiosity motive, which is not here elaborated to indicate altruism (e.g., if they had added, “so I can relieve the suffering of others”), seems simply self-serving. In any case, this curiosity motive has not figured prominently in research on motives for helping. AIDS volunteers who cite personal development (“to challenge myself and test my skills”) might be self-enhancing or might illustrate a possible role for the core social motive of controlling—efficacy and competence. The relevance of control and efficacy fits with dispositional findings that helpers often are high on general or task-specific competence, but the prosocial research has not explored this motive specifically, so we will not pursue it here. The four main motives in research on prosocial behavior thus are egotism, altruism, collectivism, and principlism, variously reflecting our core social motives.
Summary of Definitions and Motives
Prosocial behavior intends to benefit others. Social and personality psychologists have operationalized individual differences in prosocial behavior via questionnaire studies, finding that emergency helping relates to dispositional impulsivity, whereas long-term helping relates to dispositional social responsibility. Situational factors related to prosocial behavior have prompted compelling and creative experimental methods to simulate impactful situations comparable to real cases of need. Dependent measures include participants’ rate and speed of helping. Other methods include laboratory scenario studies and real-world volunteering. When people act prosocially, they do so for a variety of motivational reasons (egotism, altruism, collectivism, and principlism, at least), which variously address our core social motives, egoism reflecting both controlling and self-enhancing, altruism creating and maintaining the motive to trust the social world, collectivism helping to maintain group belonging, and principlism reflecting moral understanding and controlling.
EGOISM HYPOTHESES: PURELY SELF-ENHANCING AND CONTROLLING
In the novel by Amy Tan, an American couple—who have been living together for years but temporarily separate when the woman goes to care for her ill elderly mother—discuss putting her into a nursing home:
She was both shocked at the expense and amazed that Art would be willing to pay that for three months, nearly twelve thousand dollars. She stared at him, openmouthed.
“It’s worth it,” he whispered ….
Ruth exhaled heavily. “Listen, I’ll pay half, and if it works out, I’ll pay you back.”
“We already went through this. No halves and there is nothing to pay back. I have some money saved, and I want to do this. And I don’t mean it as a condition for us getting back together or getting rid of your mother or any of that. It’s not a condition for anything. It’s not pressure for you to make a decision one way or the other. There are no expectations, no strings attached.” (Tan, 2001, p. 322)2
In this instance, it would be easy to interpret Art’s apparent gift as a manipulative, self-serving ploy, no matter what he says. Although subsequent events suggest this to be a truly selfless act, it conceivably could also be motivated by selfish ends. And even more so, the traditional, rural Chinese family who takes in their daughter-in-law, ostensibly to avoid the ghosts’ revenge, would be most obviously interpreted as self-serving. But go back to Oseola McCarty. How can we possibly view her gift as self-interest? Maybe, being childless, she did it because the local branch of the state university held the closest thing to genetic relatives? Maybe she did it to get social rewards in a lonely life? Maybe she did it to feel good despite her arthritic pain?
Social psychologists hotly debate whether prosocial behavior is ever truly altruistic or all ultimately reduces to egoism (e.g., Batson, 1998; Hoffman, 1981; Piliavin & Charng, 1990; Schroeder, Penner, Dovidio, & Piliavin, 1995; Zaki & Mitchell, in press). Egoism seeks the ultimate goal of increasing one’s own welfare. This of course fits a simple interpretation of one evolutionary perspective. According to this approach, purely altruistic self-sacrifice would pose a nonadaptive puzzle. Why should an organism diminish or eliminate its chances of passing on its genes by sacrificing itself for another organism? Surely, this argument runs, such genetic self-sacrifice would not be selected over time, because the altruistic genes would never be passed along. Some even argue that prosocial behavior is a mistake, correctable by learning one’s accurately calculated self-interest (Burton-Chellew & West, 2013); others disagree (Camerer, 2013; Zaki & Mitchell, in press).
The simple analysis, it turns out, is deceptive, and the debate is more genuine, complex, and interesting. The proposed forms of egoistic motives include (1) kin selection (stemming from inclusive fitness), (2) social learning (including reciprocity and esteem seeking), and (3) mood protection, all forms of self-enhancement. And each could explain taking in your son’s widow, subsidizing your partner’s mother, and maybe even donating scholarships to strangers. Egoism is one of many convincing motives for prosocial behavior, but later we will see that it is not the only one.
Kin Selection
As noted in Chapter 1, the unit of natural selection, evolutionary scientists point out, is the gene, not the individual, and this basic principle is called inclusive fitness (Hamilton, 1964; Wilson & Sober, 1994). Thus, kin selection might involve adaptive pressures promoting the survival of one’s genetically related relatives. This suggests one plausible account for the evolution of prosocial behavior. If people predisposed to help their genetic relatives encourage the reproduction of such genes better than those who do not, people might be genetically predisposed to prosocial behavior. This does not mean that there is an “altruism gene,” merely that people (and other social animals) might have developed a propensity to respond to the needs of genetically related others, particularly those with reproductive potential. Kin selection could operate through a variety of motives, including pure egoism or even altruism. Evolutionary psychologists talk about people acting as if they are altruistically motivated, but with the underlying reality being genetic reproduction, in their view.
Evidence favoring the kin selection idea does suggest that people are more motivated to help genetically related others (Burnstein, Crandall, & Kitayama, 1994). As Figure 9.2 indicates, people report that they would particularly help kin, the more genetically related they are, especially under life-and-death circumstances. Women report receiving help from closer kin more than from distant kin (Essock-Vitale & McGuire, 1985). Genetic kin helping occurs for both Hong Kong Chinese and English participants (Ma, 1985).
Figure 9.2 Tendency to Help Kin, as a Function of Shared Genes
Source: Burnstein et al., 1994. Copyright © American Psychological Association. Adapted with permission.
People report being more likely to try to save another person than an animal and close relatives over strangers, and this focus on people and on relatives is consistent with the genetic relatedness hypothesis. But their propensity to help an innocent person over a uniformed Nazi suggests that similarity or empathy is important as well (Petrinovich, O’Neill, & Jorgensen, 1993). The dimensions shown in the United States are important in Taiwan also (O’Neill & Petrinovich, 1998), again suggesting cross-cultural generality. Although kinship matters and, by extension, egoism (self-enhancing and controlling), other motives (similarity and empathy) evidently matter as well. For example, meta-analysis indicates that dependency is a cue for helping (Bornstein, 1994). Many social factors are confounded with genetic relatedness and could equally account for the results.
If the evolution of pro-kin behavior makes sense, then some social-psychological mechanisms would have to include recognizing kin and detecting their distress (Hoffman, 1981; Piliavin & Charng, 1990), as well as being motivated to act. With regard to recognizing kin, mothers recognize even their newborn infants by sight and odor (Porter, 1987). Adults report feeling closer to kin the more biologically related they are (Burnstein, Crandall, & Kitayama, 1994). People help people who are similar (Schroeder, Penner, Dovidio, & Piliavin, 1995), which may be a cue for recognizing genetic relatedness.
As for detecting distress, even newborns cry when they hear other infants cry. And very young children are distressed when another is distressed. Spontaneous communication of emotions (e.g., facial expressions) could mediate helping (Buck & Ginsburg, 1991). But the underlying motives for responding to another’s distress could still include altruistic empathy, collectivism, or principlism, as well as egoism.
Even if people have evolved to behave more prosocially toward kin, they would have to be motivated to act. The immediate psychological mediators for behavior remain unclear. For example, people could help those to whom they feel emotionally close. This could represent either altruistic empathy or collectivism or an evolutionary spillover from a tendency to help genetic relatives. Self-reported probable helping in a series of hypothetical life-or-death dilemmas showed that emotional closeness partially accounted for the effects of genetic relatedness (Korchmaros & Kenny, 2001). That is, emotional closeness, not merely genetic relatedness, explains the kin-helping phenomenon. Besides emotional closeness, other possible mechanisms for kin favoritism include mere exposure (introduced in Chapters 6 and 7) and other mechanisms discussed in the rest of this chapter: positive mood, guilt, empathic distress, and attributions of responsibility (Cunningham, 1985–1986). Helping genetic relatives fits the kin selection idea, but it is silent on the psychological processes by which it would occur. And the data also fit other possible motives, for example, the ingroup we-ness of collectivism (Dovidio et al., 1991), discussed later in this chapter.
Social Learning
People might help other people for egoistic reasons other than genetic survival. For example, people might learn that prosocial behavior ultimately pays off for the self. Social learning (introduced in Chapter 6 with regard to attitudes) highlights the uniquely interpersonal processes in conditioning such social phenomena as attitudes, helping, and aggression. Processes that illustrate the prosocial kind of social learning primarily include reciprocity and social rewards. Both support egoism (self-enhancing and controlling) because what’s-in-it-for-me constitutes the primary motive. People clearly do learn cooperation from reward and punishment, according to meta-analysis (Balliet & Van Lange, 2011).
RECIPROCITY
People might learn that if they supply help, they will receive help in return, the principle of reciprocity (introduced in Chapter 7). Reciprocity could benefit genetic survival, as a form of symbiosis (literally, living together). In so-called reciprocal altruism (Trivers, 1971), if people help others who help them, then the survival of both is more likely. Regardless of an evolutionary explanation, reciprocity could simply result from short-term social learning: Helping is rewarded by the reciprocal return of the favor in some form. Recall from Chapter 7 that people like others who like them. Similarly, people help others who help them.
In relatively impersonal relationships, equity (introduced in Chapter 8) prevails, whereby people hold equivalent their respective outcomes relative to inputs. Thus, for example, if one person is overhelped, that person may be able to reciprocate other benefits, such as deference and esteem instead of reciprocal helping. In exchange, people reciprocate benefit for benefit, creating an equivalence of outcomes. If you scan articles for the seminar one week, other students should scan them other weeks. Norms favoring pure exchange-based reciprocity are strong (Gouldner, 1960). Business school alumni, for instance, cite reciprocity as one of the main reasons for donating to their alma mater, even years later (Diamond & Kashyap, 1997). The community-oriented notion of “giving-back” as an adult for what you received growing up also fits the idea of social exchange and reciprocity.
Reciprocity clearly occurs in short-term interactions. When people play experimental games with strangers, normally the researcher sets up cooperative and competitive choices, introduced earlier (Figure 9.1). Recall that the cooperative (prosocial) choice helps the partner and the competitive one hurts the partner. When people make their choices simultaneously on each trial, they eventually figure out that they both are better off if they both cooperate (Kelley, Thibaut, Radloff, & Mundy, 1962). Most relevant to considerations of reciprocal helping, research participants typically discover the most effective strategy, namely tit-for-tat (Pruitt, 1998). A tit-for-tat player cooperates only so long as the partner cooperates, but as soon as the partner defects to compete, the player also competes, until the partner cooperat
